Joseph Willits

Israel is dismantling Palestinian collective life in the West Bank. A catastrophe is unfolding across the West Bank. Checkpoints, expulsions, killings and land takeovers are not separate events or isolated human rights violations. They are part of the same system. It is time to connect the dots. Our new report, The Elimination Project, shows how these mechanisms form one political project: dismantling Palestinian collective life while expanding Israeli control and Jewish presence. Since late 2022, and especially since October 2023, this process has accelerated and become more openly violent. Palestinians live under constant threat from soldiers and armed settler militias. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed 1,107 Palestinians, including 245 children. State-backed settler farms and outposts seize vast areas, communities are expelled, and movement restrictions fragment Palestinian space. Israel is also strangling the Palestinian economy, criminalizing political and social organizing, shutting down civil society organizations and arresting journalists and activists. Together, these mechanisms cut Palestinians off from land, livelihoods and one another, dismantling the conditions they need to exist as a people – with institutions, leadership, shared history and a political future. The Elimination Project is not new. Its logic has shaped Israeli policy for decades through dispossession, fragmentation, military rule and apartheid. In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich published the “Decisive Plan,” centered on making Jewish-Israeli control irreversible. It gives Palestinians three options: relinquish their collective aspirations and live under Jewish supremacy, leave, or face military repression. Under the current government, central elements of this vision are being translated into policy, budgets, powers and practices. In Gaza, this logic has reached its most extreme manifestation: the genocide Israel is committing there. The international community must stop treating Israel’s violence and violations as isolated incidents, stop enabling Israel’s crimes, and end the impunity that allows the Elimination Project to continue. Connect the dots. See the system. Read more in our new report. btselem.org/the_elimination_…